In a plague-ravaged future where Thurston's Disease has turned medicine into a race against extinction, Dr. Walter Kramer works in a chaotic isolation lab on the edge of collapse. When Mary Barton, a widowed former nurse with nothing left to lose, volunteers as his assistant, their first exchanges spark a tense, darkly witty partnership forged by exhaustion, grief, and the constant threat of contamination. Mary soon learns the grim history of the epidemic: an ambitious immunologist's careless experiment transformed a contaminated virus into a worldwide killer, and now children, families, and the future itself are vanishing. As Kramer guides Mary through sealed necropsy suites, remote autopsies, and the ravaged bodies of the dead, the horror of the disease becomes brutally clear. Yet amid the clinical dread, their banter sharpens, their dependence deepens, and a fragile hope begins to emerge. Mary's own cough and acceptance of possible infection underline the world's numb resignation, just as Kramer suddenly believes he has found a breakthrough. In a startling twist of black comedy and scientific suspense, he concludes that heavy smoking may be the cure, setting off a bizarre reordering of medicine, morality, and social rules—before ending with a proposal Mary refuses to let him win quite so easily. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Bone, Jesse F.

Jesse F. Bone, born Jesse Franklin Bone in 1916, was an American writer whose career bridged the worlds of science, adventure, and speculative imagination. Trained as a scientist and educator before becoming widely known as an author, he brought a practical intelligence and a clear-eyed sense of possibility to his fiction, especially in the years when American readers were eager to imagine both the promise and the peril of modern technology. Over the course of his career, he earned a place in mid-century science fiction through stories and novels that combined fast-moving plots with thoughtful attention to biology, medicine, and the human consequences of scientific change. His work often explored survival under pressure, the ethics of discovery, and the fragile balance between human ingenuity and nature’s power, themes that feel especially urgent in an age shaped by global health concerns, environmental anxiety, and rapid technological change. Bone’s storytelling stands out for its ability to make scientific ideas vivid without losing sight of character, suspense, or moral tension, and that balance gives his writing a lasting appeal. Today, he remains significant as a writer who helped make science fiction a serious vehicle for thinking about real-world problems, and readers who enjoy intelligent, idea-driven speculative fiction with a strong sense of adventure and relevance will find much to admire in his work.